![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() Elizabeth ardently refused to address the issue but it was the proverbial elephant in the kingdom. The question of the succession was growing like a weed, out of control, and no one was tending to it openly, including the Queen. Queen Elizabeth I was aging and clearly not going to produce an heir. There was still religious upheaval, with no settlement reached in the country during the sixty years since Henry VIII’s Reformation. The concerns of his contemporaries were great and growing. The play was written in the early 1590’s, probably around 1593 and it is important to consider the context in which Shakespeare was writing. Yet Shakespeare’s genius in passing fiction into historical fact may have been an accident, or at least an unintended by-product or convenient cover for what he was really asking his audience, and his Queen, to think about. This is the image of King Richard that has imprinted itself onto our collective consciousness the scheming, evil murderer, worst of all, murderer of children. It is beyond doubt that Richard III is replete with errors of all kinds factual, chronological and even geographical in its efforts to damn King Richard to its audience and it succeeds. Yet we may have been deceived by Shakespeare’s play because he may not have meant us to see King Richard III in it. William Shakespeare’s play The Tragedy of Richard the Third is a masterpiece in the depiction of evil and the study of the psychology of the anti-hero, the villain we love to hate to the point that we almost hope they succeed. ![]()
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